Applying a climatologically oriented GIS in comparison of TRMM estimated severe thunderstorm rainfalls with ground truth in Sydney metropolitan area

The main objective of the current research was comparison of severe thunderstorm rainfalls with TRMM data when flash flooding events observed in the Sydney Metropolitan Area (SMA) located in NSW, Australia. Severe Thunderstorm Rainfall Events have been first extracted from the severe storm archive of the Australian BOM, by induction of specific criteria. The corresponded derived dataset includes 15 major events which occurred during the past 16 years throughout the study area. A "climatologically oriented GIS" was intently applied by introducing a range of spatial analysis and geostatistical tools, mainly for comparing and mapping of existing spatial associations among data layers. To achieve the entire accessible associations among data layers 3 different methods of General Quantile-Quantile Plot, Cross-covariance Index and a Bivariate - Pearson Correlation Coefficient tool were increasingly applied. The resulting indexes have established various different spatial correlated patterns inside the SMA, for sampled events. These indicate some agreements in dissimilar distributions, several spatial shifting for symmetric agreements and diverse overall correlation values among exiting datasets respectively. Despite the significant variations in spatial-cross-correlating models, final spatial indexes clearly demonstrate tolerable, but, positive relationships among several layers at 0.95 significance levels.